President to Target Abuses in Iran, Syria

The White House said Monday the U.S. would impose sanctions on companies, agencies and individuals inside Syria and Iran that use digital technology to help the two nations' governments crush dissent.

President Barack Obama made the announcement at the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum, saying the move was part of his effort to make good on the world vow to "never again" allow a massacre to unfold before its eyes.

ENLARGE

President Barack Obama speaks during a visit to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., on Monday.
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Mr. Obama's executive order gives U.S. officials the authority to go after anyone who supports human-rights violations using technology, but the administration chose to limit its first application to entities inside Iraq and Syria, a White House official said.

Human-rights groups said the move was likely to have little impact since it doesn't target companies that make or sell the technologies at issue.

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"This seems to be a much more focused action and punitive action on Iran and Syria, versus a more comprehensive look at how do you prevent these kinds of technologies from falling into the hands of bad actors generally," said Arvind Ganesan, business and human-rights director for the advocacy group Human Rights Watch.

Mr. Ganesan suggested that the U.S. require companies to obtain licenses if they want to sell technology to a broader swath of countries that might use it to crack down on dissent.

The president's action came after a year of popular uprisings across the Middle East showed how the use of technology could cut both ways.

On the one hand, Facebook posts, Skype chats and Twitter updates helped citizens wield outsize influence, empowering them to help topple regimes that seemed impenetrable. On the other, invasive technology, often sold by multinational companies, gave governments tools to censor websites, track citizens and crack down on activists.

Censorship Inc.

The Journal investigates the business of censorship and the use of Western technology by governments facing social unrest.

The Obama administration said it was imposing sanctions—such as seizing property or bank accounts—as well as visa bans on seven entities under the new policy, though six of the seven already had been sanctioned in an effort to stop human-rights abuses and repression of democracy.

The newly sanctioned entity is Datak Telecom, an Iranian Internet service provider that the Treasury Department said regularly collaborates with Iran's government to monitor users. Other entities that already had been sanctioned include a Syrian cellphone company and Iran's ministry of intelligence and security.

White House officials said the Treasury and State departments would make sure sanctions target businesses and entities that truly are involved in human-rights abuses, rather than those whose equipment or technology is used by others for harm.

"We need to be doing everything we can to prevent and respond to these kinds of atrocities, because national sovereignty is never a license to slaughter your people," Mr. Obama said. "These technologies should be in place to empower citizens, not to repress them."

In a series of articles last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that a host of companies had put tracking technology in the hands of repressive regimes.

The trip to the Holocaust museum was Mr. Obama's second and is part of an effort to reach out to Jewish voters, some of whom have expressed concern about his push on Israel to make concessions toward peace with the Palestinians. On Monday, he spoke of the U.S.'s commitment to both defend Israel on the world stage and to block Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

He also recounted his own visits to the Buchenwald concentration camp as president, and to Israel, before he was elected. And he announced he would award the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, posthumously to Jan Karski, an officer in the Polish underground during World War II, who provided one of the first eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust.

Also Monday, the administration's new Atrocities Prevention Board, composed of officials across the government, held its first meeting. And Mr. Obama said the intelligence community would create the first-ever National Intelligence Estimate on the global risk of mass atrocities and genocide.

The new presidential order, however, highlights the limits of Washington's ability to change policies of its enemies in the Middle East as well as the contradictions of U.S. policy in the region.

The order sidesteps what many Arab human rights activists say is the use of similar Internet monitoring technologies by Arab allies of Washington to harass, arrest and persecute their own dissidents. The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, for example, monitor Twitter and chat rooms to compile dossiers on citizens advocating for more democracy or agitating for peaceful protests against their governments. Such online writings and communications have led to trials and convictions against activists in the past year.

In Egypt, secret services employed technology from a British company to eavesdrop on dissidents using Skype. In Libya, the Gadhafi regime intercepted emails and Internet chats of dissidents using a system from a French company and tapped the country's phone calls using a South African company's technology.

Across the Gulf, governments have relied on tools from American and Canadian companies to censor the Internet. Blue Coat Systems Inc. acknowledged in an interview last year that Syrian Internet providers were using its devices to block websites, though the California-based company said it never sold the technology to Syria.

Iran has bought high-tech tools from major international companies to track the location of people's cellphones and intercept and record calls on mobile networks, the Journal documented.

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